Student evaluations of the credibility and argumentation of online sources

Abstract

This study investigated upper secondary school students' skills in evaluating the credibility and argumentative content of a blog text and a YouTube video. Both sources concerned child vaccination, the blog text opposing and the YouTube video supporting it. Students rated each source as credible, fairly credible or non-credible, justified their ratings, and analyzed the argumentation of both sources. Their justifications were analyzed for trustworthiness and expertise and their argument analyses for identification of the main position of the source and the reasons supporting it. Students' justification skills proved fairly weak, and they also struggled with recognizing unbalanced argumentation. Students' skill in analyzing the argumentation used in the sources also proved inadequate, especially in the blog text task. Overall academic achievement significantly predicted students' credibility evaluation and argument analysis skills. The results suggest that greater emphasis should be placed on tasks involving the interpretation and analysis of online information.

The influence of knowledge type and source reputation on preferences for website or video search results

“…An exception is the work by Wittenberg et al (2021), who found, across two studies, that the presented information was perceived as more believable for learners confronted with a video than for learners confronted with a text in the context of political and healthrelated topics. One other study by Marttunen et al (2021) showed that secondary school students performed poorly in justifying their evaluation of credibility and argumentative content of both video and text-based online sources. However, participants showed even poorer performance in justifying why a source was less credible for a video resource than for a text resource.…”

Prospective Science Teachers' Information Literacy and Scientific Argumentation Skills in Online Learning During COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Therefore, facilitating teachers' learning needs is needed as scaffolding (Vogel et al, 2022) for students through the learning process (Lase, 2019) Scaffolding through the learning process is important because using digital devices for learning tools in accessing, evaluating, and using information validity of online learning resources is still a challenge for students (Barrot et al, 2021). In particular, the skills to analyze and evaluate information sources are proven inadequate (Marttunen et al, 2021). In addition, students also experience difficulties in understanding argumentation, especially the role of warrants in scientific argumentation (Martín-Gámez & Erduran, 2018).…”

“…Students must be able to compile strong evidence warrants to make claims about a problem or issue they face, so facilitating the practice of argumentation in learning is needed to improve it (Yilmaz et al, 2017). Improving students' ability to assess the credibility of sources and recognizing arguments from reference sources that involve interpretation and analysis of online information is crucial because it is an information processing stage (Marttunen et al, 2021).…”

“…Research related to the analysis of information literacy skills (Barrot et al, 2021;Marttunen et al, 2021) and argumentation skills (Suryani et al, 2020;Tenriawaru et al, 2021) has been carried out a lot, but they are still separated. The change in the learning paradigm during the pandemic will undoubtedly impact these two skills.…”

Superlatives, clickbaits, appeals to authority, poor grammar, or boldface: Is editorial style related to the credibility of online health messages?

“…Adolescents search less systematically ( Bilal and Kirby, 2002 : 661–663; Hansen et al, 2003 : 7), their search is superficial, and they seldom consider the source of the information ( Hansen et al, 2003 : 7; Wallace et al, 2000 : 93–94). It seems that adolescents’ skills are rather inadequate and insufficient ( Marttunen et al, 2021 : 300–301). When evaluating sources, their assessments are focused more on relevance or accessibility (non-epistemic justification) than reliability or credibility (epistemic justification) ( Coiro et al, 2015 : 294; List et al, 2016 : 47).…”